Enter the Modern Landscape

Cities are often perceived as vibrant laboratories in which certainties of the past meet with current and future societal challenges. However, at a closer look, rural areas increasingly appear to be the locus where the political, economic and social balances of entire regions are really at stake.

As our planet reaches a breaking point, it is time to critically reconsider the role of the different actors shaping such diverse territories. At a time of climate change and shifting paradigms—and of a belated assessment of the illusion we once called modernity—our man-made environment bears testimony of a growing unease about how soil and natural landscapes have been gnawed away by industry and urban sprawl.

The exhibition Enter the Modern Landscape reflects upon a European heritage made up of 20th century rural settlements, whose implementation was guided by ideologies of various kinds that have crossed and marked this century.
The exhibition aims at questioning a cultural aggregate examined through selected archival pieces—coming from a vast European academic research programme composed of hundreds of case studies throughout the continent—and other artefacts from the same period.

There is undeniably a Learning from... of these rural conditions, without omitting to set out a critical vision of this heritage for future society, thereby addressing the opportunities to shape places of coexistence outside the city and forge their collective dimensions, under the influence of a more diffuse, flexible and even informal backdrop of the 21st century.

Curators: Francelle Cane, Axel Fisher and Iwan Strauven